The Billion Dollar Code (Season 1)

The Billion Dollar Code (2021) is a German Netflix miniseries you can watch online on iFILM. Berlin, the early 1990s, the wall freshly down: art student Carsten Schlüter and hacker Juri Müller build software that lets you fly across the whole planet on satellite imagery.

They call it Terravision — a forerunner of what the world will later know as Google Earth. The story runs on two timelines: two young dreamers in a cluttered Berlin studio, and the same men decades on, grey and worn, seated in a US courtroom. They're suing the tech giant over the patent, and the deeper it goes, the clearer it gets — proving you had the idea first is far harder than having it. Mark Waschke and Mišel Matičević play the older pair; Leonard Scheicher and Marius Ahrendt, their younger selves.

Director Robert Thalheim shaped the four episodes around the real ART+COM lawsuit against Google, and the result plays less like a tech thriller than a drama about a future that slipped away. What lingers is the friendship and the grudge, not the code. Stream The Billion Dollar Code online on iFILM.